


The White Dragon

by Mothfinder_General



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 20:20:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1615835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mothfinder_General/pseuds/Mothfinder_General
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is charged with the force of ki and a talented few can control it, use it to fight and use it to connect. (Suria would like you to stop making such a big deal about it.) </p><p>Underworld gangs, government-controlled assassins and mercenaries for hire fight the battles of a tiny powerful minority, while ordinary people just carry on living. (Look, Suria just wants her damn pay cheque.) </p><p>On the streets of Shanghai, Suria is set a shadowing assignment, following a possibly notorious red-head who may or may not be working for the yakuza and who may or may not be a murderer... (God, Suria is so sick of his bullshit.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

By the third day, after watching the red-headed stranger do nothing more remarkable than eat noodles bought from street vendors, snap photos and wander dreamily through the People’s Square Park, Suria was coming to the conclusion that her superiors had got the wrong man.

 

She was sat three tables away from him in a café, drinking jasmine tea in an artificially cool breeze. Outside, a humid June afternoon lay like clingfilm over the Shanghai streets. Trucks and cars grumbled past the window, burping exhaust fumes. Sweaty people carrying shopping bags, briefcases or miscellaneous tools dodged and danced around one another on the pavement. The flow of movement was unceasing, exhausting even to watch. Suria turned her attention back to her target.

 

He was hard to miss. He stood at about six foot four and had cool white skin that burnished to a biscuit-and-pink tan in the sun. He had a scar that ran from cheekbone to cheekbone across his nose, dividing a face of imperious, angular masculinity, and hair that fell to his shoulders in a fashion that should have looked effeminate but merely looked dirty. It glowed a freakish reddish-blond, which might have been unremarkable in Europe or America, but here in China, combined with his height, his colouring and his bone structure, it made him a one-stop gawping post for half of the city.

 

According to Suria’s superiors, he was one of the most dangerous men in the world.

 

Her remit expressly forbade direct interaction with the red-headed stranger. She had been warned he was a killer with a mind full of cold little cogwheels, a sort of psychopath savant. Conflicting sources had him as a spy, a scientist (of sorts), a renowned martial artist, a mercenary, a sadist, a gunman, a murderer. Suria had watched him order a stir fry in an informal eatery by the docks yesterday evening. He had done nothing more murderous than feed scraps of his chicken to a stray cat, which had sat hiccupping gently under his chair.

 

Suria, a chameleonic Pan-Asian non-entity who looked like the kind of woman destined to have ‘Villager #4’ on her gravestone, had spent three days systematically blending into the background wherever he went. She was starting to think that the only danger she was in was being bored to death.

 

According to her brief, the red-head had been retained by a Japanese proto-yakuza organisation named Soshiki within the last six months, although his exact role within the organisation was undetermined. Suria’s vague but pressing mission was to follow the red-head around until she had enough information about how he was communicating with Soshiki, if at all. She was, in effect, insurance against the possibility that he was a main player.

 

She had begun to sulkily suspect that this was a test – that her superiors knew exactly what the red-head was up to, or else knew that he was a nobody, and were wondering how long it would take her to work it out. She had a mental image of her line manager, Jia Po-han, tugging and squeezing at his earlobes, something he did when he was amused at someone else’s expense. “Xu-rui,” he would undoubtedly chide her, wilfully mispronouncing her name (he spoke English almost faultlessly, Japanese and Farsi with a heavy accent but flawless grammar). “Xu-rui, you spent a week watching that white motherfucker look at maps upside down and order ‘chop suey’ before you thought he might not be Billy the Kid? Was you brain having a period or something?”

 

The red-head was paying for his tea and sweet dumplings, with much miming and grinning on both sides of the transaction. Suria leaned back in her chair and affected exhausted nonchalance, balancing her neck along the back of the chair so that her black-brown hair hung down the back. If she turned her head slightly she had a view through the window of the street outside, which sloped downwards, giving her a vista of about twenty feet towards the east. She heard the red-head scrape back his chair, murmur _xie xie_ and stride out. A few seconds later he appeared in her square of vision, bobbing and turning this way and that in the flow of humanity like a message in a bottle before heading – as she expected – east, towards the docks.

 

She pulled out some notes and coins, banged them on the table, shouted a quick thanks to the serving staff and moved rapidly after him.

 

The red-head was a terrible tourist. He had a folding map that unfolded to picnic blanket proportions, and it had so far inconvenienced him more than it orientated him. At one point in the previous day it had caught a breeze blowing off the Nanjin River and slapped several passersby in the face, like a comedy Monty Python fish. None of the map’s victims had been amused. Evidently chagrined by this experience, the red-head was now relying on the flow of traffic to guide him through the city. This was a bad idea, as it was getting on for the end of the working day and most people in the streets were heading to their homes in one of the less salubrious sections of the Yangpu Distict. Suria was herself a skilled martial artist – it was a prerequisite of her job – but, based on her observations, she didn’t fancy the red-head’s chances if they ran up against a street gang.

 

He moved at a gentle amble; she followed ten feet behind, matching his pace step for step, reacting to his movements with the care and closeness of a lover. His uncertain perambulations had brought them to one of the older parts of the district. Blocks of concrete flats, huddled around one another like conspirators, created strange alleys off the main road. Store fronts, brightly decorated with incredibly non-specific adverts – all featuring happy young Chinese women holding bottles and packets close to their faces – became more and more derelict and shuttered the further they travelled. After twenty minutes, Suria and the red-head were the only people in a small, dank passage, leading with hopeless inevitability to a greyish residential street. Suria kept quiet and kept to the shadows. He hadn’t noticed her for three days, and she wasn’t going to let him notice her now.

 

The residential street ahead had a look of malignant occupancy, as if something unpleasant was waiting in its den just out of sight. Suria, hypersensitive to all forms of danger, found herself twitching her head to catch sounds on the breeze. Sure enough, she could hear voices: overloud, taut and sharp. Young male voices around the corner were cracking half-heard jokes and making deliberate, aggressive guffaws. Suria felt her fingers tingle with a tiny kick of adrenalin. She caught herself trying to guesstimate numbers, weights and heights.

 

Typically, the red-head didn’t seem to have noticed the nearing shouts, and was engaged in scraping a mud crust from his shoe on a loose brick.

 

At the mouth of the passage, a group of young men in bandannas had appeared. They had adopted the same streetwise uniform; they wore low-cut, three-quarter-length shorts, branded t-shirts and, most importantly, belts hung with short knives. They paused in their tracks when they saw the red-head, then a few of them laughed a little lower than before. One of the gang swaggered forward.

 

“Eh! _Guilao_!” he called.

 

The red-head glanced up, smiled charmingly and kicked the brick away. _White motherfucker_ , thought Suria gloomily.

 

“That’s an expensive looking coat, _guilao_ ,” the catcaller continued, in Mandarin. “I think it would look good on me.”

 

His friends sniggered. The red-head pursed his lips then adopted an oddly foppish pose – one ankle crossed over the other, one hand on his hip. He really was wearing an expensive coat, Suria realised. It was a lightweight silk trenchcoat, black despite the heat. He wore it over his shoulders like a cloak, the arms flapping semaphore-like behind him. It added to his general air of privileged unconcern.

 

“Sorry,” he said in broken Mandarin, “no Chinese.”

 

“’No Chinese’, huh?” the boy mimicked. “Maybe we better give you some Chinese lessons, _guilao_? Some quick lessons in how to beg for mercy like a foreign dog?”

 

Suria, out of sight behind a pile of rubbish, cursed to herself. She was forbidden to touch the red-head, signal to him or otherwise notify him of her presence, so presumably intervention was out of the question. On the other hand, he seemed to be actively trying to get himself killed, and that would make her job of spying on him even duller than usual – corpses don’t have very active professional lives. She stepped out from behind the rubbish, keeping softly in the shade cast by the building beside her.

 

The next building was low – an abandoned workshop, probably – and crumbling with neglect. She quietly scaled a bin and some dubious-looking bamboo scaffolding, and settled into a crouch on the roof to watch.

 

The young men had moved forwards in fits and starts, encouraging one another, and were now surrounding the red-head with much chuckling and nervous machismo. The red-head, to his credit, was as relaxed as a window-shopper. He didn’t even flinch when the ringleader pulled his knife out of his belt with a too-quick flourish. He even stayed impassive when the ringleader grunted softly and the blade started to glow dull blue with low-level _ki_.

 

Suria felt herself gnawing on her lower lip with impatience and forced herself to stop. _I could take these baby thugs out in five moves_ , she thought irritably. _Is that supposed to be a_ ki _force attack? Why doesn’t he just stick to using the knife as a plain weapon? He obviously not strong enough to call anything harmful up. Kids these days are so pretentious._

“Let’s try lesson one, _guilao_ ,” the ringleader was saying. “Lesson one – coat is mine, or knife is in yours.” He tugged sharply at the collar of the coat. The _ki_ energy playing flame-like on his knife flickered weakly. He had a look of weirdly fierce determination in his eyes, like a rabid weasel. Suria judged him to be more dangerous than his friends – damaged and disaffected, the sort of kid with nothing to lose.

 

“ _Bu_ ,” said the red-head, still mild. _No_. The other boys chuckled uncertainly. One pulled out his knife as well, and waggled it at the red-head. No _ki_ – only the ringleader had enough power to produce it.

 

“He said no, Wei,” another squeaked excitedly. This one looked like a rat on its hind legs. He moved from foot to foot. “He said no, Wei, he said no. What’re you gonna do?”

 

“I’ll show you what I’ll do,” growled the ringleader Wei.

 

He rocked back on his heels, just momentarily, and then lunged and stabbed the red-head in the stomach.

 

Wei jerked the knife out, leaving a trail of blue _ki_ flames that crackled into non-existence. The other young men froze mid-sneer, rigid with sudden terror. Even Wei looked shocked at what he’d done. His blank hard face was set in disbelief; his knife arm twitched. The red-head swayed gently. He touched a hand to his ribs, raised it to his eyes. His palm was slick with blood.

 

 _There’s blood on the blade too_ , thought Suria. Part of her was panicking but another part, cruelly, felt justified and had already started to mentally wrap up and go home. No fighter as powerful as the red-head was supposed to be would have bled after a stabbing. He would have taken damage, of course, but to actually bleed from an attack that inexpert? This guy was just some poor stupid tourist who looked striking enough to be set as a shadowing assignment for a rookie in the field. And now he was going to be killed.

 

The red-head made of fist of his dripping hand, smeared his fingers around the mess, and laughed. The sound chilled Suria. It maddened Wei, who suddenly became frenzied.

 

“You think this is funny, _shabi_? You think it’s fucking funny that you’re going to die?” he screamed. His friends had shaken off the spell and were backing away. The red-head stood, calm as before, blood dripping onto the ground before him.

 

“Leave it, Wei, it’s not worth it,” muttered one, trembling with anxiety. “Let’s go, brother, before the cops come.”

 

“Yeah Wei, it’s just a coat,” squeaked the ratty kid.

 

Wei’s mouth contorted furiously. Suria could almost smell his animal stink, turning him feral. “This isn’t about the fucking coat!” he shrieked. “Not about the fucking coat!” And he slashed the red-head again.

 

The red-head raised his arms to defend himself from the blow and received a nasty cut to the forearm, the force of which made him stumble back. His white shirt was soaked in blood. The coat had fallen to the ground and was trampled as Wei leapt forward with a weird twisted scream to drive the blade into the red-head’s right shoulder. He was too crazed to control any _ki_ force – the knife dug in, a plain blade, hard and true.

 

 _This is not happening_ , Suria thought. _This is not happening._ Her thigh muscles were quivering with tension. The scene in front of her had a nightmarishly television quality, tableau-like and inevitable.Then suddenly it was happening, directly in front of her.

 

Her brain caught up while her body went into automatic. Okay, it said to her, we have leapt from the rooftop into the fray. This was not the most sensible thing we could do, but okay. I see we have gouged someone’s eyes, did we see who? No? Oh well, never mind, they’re off. Okay, now we are punching Wei in the stomach and kicking him in the temple. Oh look, we’ve slipped on blood. How did we get here from ‘do not touch the red-headed stranger’ I wonder? Was there some sort of coded subtext to that order that translated ‘keep your distance’ to ‘get out there and fall on your arse’?

 

At Suria’s appearance from the sky (or at least the roof), most of the gang had run for it, hollering, but Wei and two lieutenant types had stayed. One ran round Wei and kicked Suria in the ribs while she was still on the floor, jumping back as if she were an unexploded bomb. Suria stumbled upright, pulling out her weapon: a blunt regulation cosh, carved with the eye-watering insignias of her employers. She kept it strapped to her back and as she swung it round, a great arc of _ki_ fire trailed after it, smashing into the wannabe mugger and throwing him into the wall of the crumbling building. He groaned and stirred against the wall but did not get up.

 

The other lieutenant caught Suria’s eyes, saw them opaque with violence, did some quick survival arithmetic and ran for it.

 

This left Wei. Wei, somewhat surprisingly, had prepared a small fireball. It thudded into Suria’s chest. She felt her abdomen throb with an awful, itchy pain but there was no visible damage – Suria was, after all, a professional.

 

She turned to face him and finish him off – he was just a moderately talented street kid, after all – but a shot rang out behind her. Suria snapped to attention, then frantically looked down at herself and raked her nails at her shirt. _I didn’t even feel it_ , she thought desperately, her ears gonging. _It didn’t even hurt!_ But there were no holes, no blood, nothing. _Not hit_.

 

She looked up sharply and caught Wei’s eyes just before they rolled back in his head. A wet little black hole had appeared in his forehead. His mouth opened loosely, making him look suddenly very young, and he folded up and hit the ground. By the wall, his lieutenant moaned and fainted.

 

“He’s dead,” said Suria aloud. “My god, he’s dead.”

 

“I should certainly hope so,” said a honeyed voice behind her, in perfect Mandarin. “I shot him in the head.”

 

Suria turned.

 

The red-head was half sitting, half lying in a pool of his own blood. His once white shirt was dark and drenched, his lips were alarmingly white. The coat lay in the dust, ruined. He was supporting himself on one elbow, bleeding everywhere, and looking very much like he was enjoying a day at the beach.

 

“I wondered what it would take to make you step out,” he continued calmly.

 

Suria’s mind raced. “You – saw me?” she managed.

 

“I’ve seen nothing but your furtive little face, poking out of corners, for three days,” said the red-head drily. “But I knew you’d come to get me. You can’t afford to lose me. Now. Do something about this.”

 

And with that, he collapsed into an unconscious heap.

 

Suria stood in the middle of the noisome alley, surrounded by three prone bodies – one of which would be staying prone for good. She felt like she’d arrived at the tail end of a party, and no one wanted to talk to her or tell her what was going on.

 

“Rat’s cocks,” she muttered, and started to frantically tear that troublesome silk coat, to bind the red-head’s wounds.

%MCEPASTEBIN%


	2. Chapter 2

It was a chore to get the red-head’s prone body out to the closest main road, and then almost impossible to get a taxi ride back to Suria’s safe house. Drivers slowed down for her, but as soon as she indicated the blood-stained, unconscious white man slumped against the wall, they slammed foot to pedal and were off into the horizon. She tried flashing her money, she tried flashing her thighs. She even tried flashing a smile, but she was too desperate and the smile came out snarled up. In the end she resorted to good old-fashioned menace. One unlucky taxicab slowed down for a perspiring and impatient Suria and wound down his window, only to find her cosh, _ki­-_ charged and humming, pointed directly into his face.

 

“Give us a ride and I won’t burn your nose off,” she growled hoarsely. Either the driver recognised the insignias on the cosh or else Suria just looked genuinely crazed, because he nodded so hard his nose might have come off of its own accord.

 

The ride was an uncomfortable one. Suria sat in the back, giving roundabout directions in a monotone, the red-head’s blazing red head in her lap. He was already running a disturbing temperature and his skin was slick and froggy with sweat. Suria had tried to lay him out on the back seat, but he was too tall and she was forced to help him tuck his legs up against his wounded chest. He seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness. Occasionally, his eyes would roll beneath their translucent lids. His light lashes trembled.

 

She tried not to think about how much trouble she was in.

 

The safe house was actually an apartment, a self-contained flat with a secret entrance in a distressingly classy brothel. It was set in a multi-storey building and masqueraded as an expensive, old-fashioned hotel. Gorgeous, sophisticated women, in cocktail dresses and or silk cheongsams, sat in the downstairs bar like a garden of bored hothouse flowers, attended by men of the same fatness and persistence as bees. Money discreetly changed hands and couples departed for the rooms upstairs, or lingered a while over cocktails of astonishing alcoholic content. The building itself was a comprehensive palace of pleasure. There was a sauna, a big Japanese-style sauna of purely orgiastic intentions, a massage parlour, a tiny theatre underground, even a restaurant somewhere on the third floor.

 

Jia Po-han had installed Suria in the apartment a couple of weeks ago, cautioning ‘extreme secrecy’ with a camp waggling of the brows. He proceeded to take her on a tour of the labyrinthine floors and casually pointed out interesting architectural details. There were rooms here designed to be hidden, designed, in fact, for _lurking_. For _listening_ and even _peeping_. Suria hadn’t been able to look Po-han in the face. Only a savage sense of professionalism had prevented her from blushing and wibbling all over the place, and even that had been done with a stiff-jawed defiance that Po-han had found amusing. The building, its purpose, made her feel… young. Oh, she’d had boyfriends and she’d seen a thing or two, most of which had been a strange mixture of exciting and underwhelming, but she hadn’t realised how much time, effort, money and imagination some people put in to the sort of things animals and birds do as a matter of course.

 

The entrance to the safe flat was reached around the back of the ‘hotel’, where the rubbish was left out. A door, forgettable among the refuse and rats, led down into a cavernous boiler room. There were several secret doors in the boiler room, hidden by the shadows, the steam and frankly by good camouflage. Suria had some vague but insistent ideas about what the other secret rooms were used for. Nevertheless, once combined with the summer heat outside, the temperature in the boiler room was close to unbearable and even the most ardent of surreptitious lovers would be attacked by dizzy spells more intense than desire’s sweet and single-minded arrows.

 

Suria’s secret door was the most carefully hidden and she manhandled the red-head through the entrance now. Suria had to squat to enter; the red-head, briefly conscious, had to bend double and did so with a strained grunt that spoke eloquently of his agony.

 

The passage that led to the apartment was really a glorified crawl space. Suria had meticulously swept it clean after she had first arrived, to avoid leaving tell-tale tracks, but it was a charmless, dark little passage that led up and up to her flat: on the sixth floor, sound-proofed, and inaccessible from the hotel proper.

 

She walked behind the red-head, propelling him up the passage. Her arms were already damp with his blood.

 

“You always take me to the nicest places,” muttered the red-head in Mandarin.

 

“Shut up and stop bleeding,” she replied tightly.

 

They arrived, eventually, at the door. She reached her arms around the red-head to unlock it, her nose pressed uncomfortably into his armpit. When the door swung open he toppled slowly into the room.

 

The entrance opened directly into a neat little kitchen space, sparsely lit with high windows. Beyond the kitchen was a space so tiny it could barely be called a corridor, and simply provided some standing room in which a person could pick one of two doors. The door on the left led to a barely furnished sitting room with an adjoining toilet and all-purpose tub; the door on the right led to a sumptuous, extravagant bedroom with an en suite wet room and a commode like an armchair made of porcelain.

 

Suria sighed enormously, stepped over the red-head and proceeded to drag him into the bedroom.

 

He came round abruptly as she was trying to lift him. “Water,” he barked. Then, as an afterthought, “Needle.”

 

He flopped clumsily onto bed. It had beautifully carved and lacquered headboards (the lacquer webbed with cracks here and there, neglected) but very plain whiteish sheets which looked as if they had been boiled clean. When Po-han had first shown her the room, Suria had been able to feel the depletion in the air: it had been a long time since the apartment had been used by any of the ‘hotel’s’ customers or its lovely ladies.

 

She trotted back into the kitchen, forcing herself to think only in immediacies.

 

Boil water, she told herself severely. Those wounds need cleaning. Get some bandages from the first aid kit, the completely useless first aid kit. Fucking sticky plasters. Ah, bandages. Disinfect a needle with the flame from the gas ring. Find something to stitch the wounds shut. Water coming to the boil now. Mix with a little bleach. Take it in. You brought him home, now you have to look after him.

 

The red-head had bled through his makeshift bandages and had quite ruined the sheets. His lips were chalky.

 

Suria gingerly set her bowl of bleach-water, her needle, some scissors and her bandages down on the bedside table. “Ji- my employers left this place quite well stocked. There’s some _mafei_ , some syringes-”

 

“No morphine,” said the red-head sharply. “Don’t you understand what’s happening, girl?”

 

Suria knelt beside the bed and set to work, cutting him out of his shirt. Oh, thank you so much for saving me, mysterious lady, she thought sourly. She cleaned away the blood with slightly more briskness than necessary.

 

The wounds were oozing oddly; the one in the red-head’s stomach seemed to be writhing, changing shape against the skin like a caterpillar metamorphosing. As Suria bent closer, looking for the right place to draw the needle through, she caught a whiff of some distinctly unbiological smells: snow, gunpowder.

 

“Your meridians are trying to realign themselves,” she said to the red-head, her fingers moving quickly. “Your body can’t understand why it’s been stabbed. It’s… attacking you, I think. Your biotemporal memory has been disrupted…”

 

“It’s the Blossoming of a Thousand Poison Flowers,” said the red-head, in his slangy Mandarin.

 

Suria nodded vaguely and started on the wound in his shoulder. He breathed in sharply but didn’t cry out. His skin seemed to be flashing hot and cold and was curiously unpleasant to touch, repellently waxy and inhuman. He felt like a malfunctioning machine. As another roiling temperature change pulsated under her fingers, she thought, There goes the Blossoming. And underneath that, quieter and almost wordless, she thought that she ought to slip the red-head some morphine anyway, for all the good it would do him – it was very likely that he was going to die.

 

“No morphine,” repeated the red-head coolly, and she started. He smiled unpleasantly. “I could see the pity on your face. You women are all the same: put a bleeder in front of you and the maternal urge just obliterates your brains. Morphine won’t help.” He flicked a lizard-like tongue over his lips. “Water.”

 

Suria, furious, abandoned a bandage in mid-wrap and stomped off to the kitchen. She returned with a glass slopping over with water from the purified water tank. The red-head took it off her with his good arm and swallowed it in one gulp.

 

He handed the glass back. “More,” he instructed, and started tying his bandages himself, with his good arm and his teeth.

 

Suria brought back another glass, fuming. But really, she asked herself, what can I do? Ask him to get it himself? He could say thank you, though. If not for the water, then maybe for the whole not letting him bleed to death thing.

 

He drank more slowly, watching her from the corner of his eye. She met his gaze with all the blankness she could muster. He smiled sneeringly again, slid his eyes away and handed her the glass with ostentatious graciousness.

 

“Your name,” he said. It was barely a question.

 

Suria blinked, taken aback. “It’s, er, er-”

 

“Yes?” said the red-head, with syrupy sarcasm.

 

“It’s, ah, it’s, it’s Li.” As soon as this was out of her mouth, she felt her face muscles involuntarily spasm with humiliation. Li! What a stupid name. What a stupid sound, for that matter. It was the first syllable she had plucked out of the air. She might as well have called herself Spick or Chee. It was the name on her false papers (which, for the record, was Lee Yinghui. The papers were so obviously forged that police officers tended to leave her alone: their flamboyant phoniness spoke of an immense confidence in a hidden but probably very important and short-tempered power).

 

The red-head let his lips draw back in an incredulous, open-mouthed grin. “ _Li_?” he repeated, with cruel delight. “You’re Li _shi_ , are you? Miss Li? That’s what you’ve decided to be?”

 

She gathered her reserves of haughtiness and disinterest. “Yes, you may call me Miss Li. And what is your name?”

 

The red-head snorted and settled back. “Give me a few minutes to come up with a stupid pseudonym and I’ll let you know.”

 

Suria had just enough self-control to pick up the dirty bleach water, glide into the kitchen and tip it down the sink before sinking her teeth into her fist.

 

That bastard! That cheeky, oblivious cuntwhistle! It wasn’t so much that he was rude, but that he seemed to be actively challenging her to do something about it. Which she couldn’t! Because she was already operating so far out of her remit that she might as well be on an outer ring of Saturn!

 

She didn’t know what to do, except to keep him alive for as long as she could. She didn’t want to think about the logistical problems of disposing of his body, let alone the world of trouble she’d be in after his disappearance.

 

It was already about eight in the evening. Suria flicked the lights in the kitchen on and a couple of bulbs sputtered sadly into life. She gazed listlessly into cupboards and tugged the tiny fridge open. There were plenty of raw ingredients, but they all looked unappetizing and faintly hostile. She felt as if attempting to cook anything would be as arduous as having an argument. The low-grade panic that had been keeping her going had peaked sharply then withdrawn, leaving her feeling drained and glum.

 

She clapped the fridge shut and drifted into the little sitting room. The furniture in here consisted of a large speckled mirror and a serviceable couch. This was presumably the room that the hired women would prepare themselves in, cleaning themselves off afterwards in the austere bathroom. Customers would never need to see anything but the emergent butterfly they’d paid for. This knowledge gave the room a depressing utility, like seeing a compost heap next to a rose bush.

 

Suria pulled the dust sheet off the couch, miserably lethargic. She was going to have to sleep here tonight. There were some spare blankets in one of the chests in the bedroom, but she was upset even by the thought of going back in there. She decided to have a wash instead.

 

Crouched in the tub under the bare tap, she stared to feel better. There was something comforting in the clearness of the water, the ascetic, self-sufficient nature of her toilette. Shanghai’s greasy dirt was sluiced off her skin, taking with it the sense of vulnerability. A clean body is a blessing, thought Suria, it is like wiping a bad calculation from a blackboard. Anyway… I don’t have to make a progress report for another four days. He’ll be dead by then, or he won’t. I can’t fight a Blossoming, I can only witness it. At least it might be a chance for me to learn something about him; it seems no one knows _anything_ , except that he’s an unspeakable bastard. She remembered his scorn again, his easy dismissal, and scrubbed vigorously between her toes.

 

After she’d towelled off and changed into clean clothes – thank goodness she had had the foresight to hang a few in the little bathroom – she strode back into the kitchen to make dinner. She imagined herself walking with purpose into the bedroom, a bowl in either hand, setting one down on the bedside table and asking, with just a hint of condescension, whether the red-head needed spoon-feeding.

 

She prepared a pork bone broth with noodles and spooned out two servings to take through. At the door of the bedroom, she hesitated. She hadn’t factored doorknobs into her vision. Nevertheless, putting down a bowl to open the door felt like it would break up a beautiful continuous movement that was propelling her into adventure rather than disaster, so she opened it with her elbow. It was for this reason that she heard the sound of marching footsteps before she saw anything in the room.

 

The sound faded away as she nudged the door open with her hip. The red-head was unconscious again, sprawled out over the bed. A faint golden mist twisted above his body before dissipating completely. He coughed sharply, mumbled.

 

Interesting, thought Suria. It’s started already.

 

She approached the bed cautiously. The red-head had managed, somehow, to kick off his shoes, but he still had his trousers on and she noticed, with a new efficient clarity, that he also still wore his gun belt. She remembered Wei, and felt a cold flash down her spine.

 

She lowered herself slowly and put the bowls on the floor. She didn’t dare move too fast; a slight disturbance of air could bring the red-head round again, and in his feverish state he might draw and fire on her automatically. She raised her hands to his hips with agonising stealth, every muscle creaking with the effort.

 

Just as she was about to grasp the belt, he came round with a startled exclamation and grabbed her wrists with one hand. Suria squeaked.

 

His eyes were bloodshot and focused on a spot about three inches behind her head. He snarled something at her in what she recognised as Japanese, but he didn’t seem to see her and his eyes were wobbling precariously. His grip started to cut off her circulation and, sure enough, his other hand was going for the gun. Suria thought quickly and swung her leg out and round, in a stunted roundhouse kick that caught the red-head squarely in the groin.

 

His pupils went wide with pain then, rapidly, shrank back to their normal size. The focus returned. “Miss Li,” he muttered. “Shanghai.”

 

“Welcome back,” she said flatly. He dropped her wrists and she realised she was shaking.

 

He glanced into her face and looked down. “Ah. Dinner.”

 

She didn’t manage to make the spoon-feeding joke. They ate in silence, she cross-legged on the floor. When they were done, he indicated the door to the luxurious en suite and asked, “Is that the ‘’?”

 

It was a Japanese word she didn’t recognise, but there was really only one room it could be, so Suria replied, “Yes,” and made a note of this rather old-fashioned prudishness.

 

“Help me up,” he instructed. She took his outstretched arm and supported his weight until he got both feet on the floor. His bare skin was clammy and strange against hers, violently unwelcome. Once again, Suria reviewed with some incredulousness the chain of events that could have led to this unbelievable situation.

 

They stopped at the door. Suria opened it. She really, absolutely could not bring herself to step over the threshold. “There’s a spare toothbrush,” she told him. “Go ahead.” He laughed very loudly at that and, walking his hands along the wall to support himself, entered the huge bathroom.

 

Suria pushed the door shut behind him and hurried to get the spare blankets out from the chest.

 

Half an hour later, nocturnal ablutions completed, she lay on the couch in the sitting room and unravelled a loose stitch at the edge of the blanket. She thought about foolish dead Wei, about the gun belt, about the imminent Blossoming, but above all she thought about the worst thing her employers could do when they found out what had happened. It wasn’t entirely impossible that they might have her killed.

%MCEPASTEBIN%


	3. Chapter 3

Suria fell into an uneasy sleep, sinking under half-remembered lessons and warnings about the Blossoming of a Thousand Poison Flowers.

 

That line summed up the red-head’s fate with a grim poetry more terrible than Suria’s medical delineations. The _ki_ force that should have been the red-head’s shield and his weapon had been deliberately arrested when he was stabbed. She didn’t know how he’d done it; merely controlling the flow of _ki_ required stringent self-discipline and innate talent. Most people would be strong enough to summon up a slap from across a room, maybe break a nose or a finger if they concentrated; stronger, more gifted amateurs like Wei could even maim and conjure on a moderate scale; but only the exceptional few could do real damage or use the coursing of power to harden and protect their bones and vital organs (except their brains) from damage. Nevertheless, once learned, it came as naturally to the body as a heartbeat, and shutting off from _ki_ required extraordinary psychic dexterity. A rare precious few managed that level of control. Why would they? Why learn to swim so that you could drown more intelligently?

 

Some _ki_ wielders did force themselves to learn to shut themselves off, though – philosophers, radical doctors, the suicidally curious. And some, in their naked, cut-off states, were injured. When the power flowed back, it flooded a body that had been broken with impossible ordinariness. There was a metaphysical chasm between the body that should be inhabited and the body that was. It caused a localised disruption of reality, and the focus of the disruption was the injured body. It blossomed into a thousand poison flowers – dark, internal bursts of _ki_ , which damaged the flesh, not just of the body, but the remembered body and the future body too. Metaphors took on a ghastly reality; memories solidified in the air, walked the floors or rattled the walls; sometimes contradictory parts of a personality would fight it out in a person’s very skin.

 

Of course, to most people, this would just look like a rather messy and drawn-out demise, accompanied by a lot of screaming and delirium. Not everyone could see the Blossoming’s manifesting hallucinations – scenes of an individual’s past clustered in the air like a swarm of flies. But Suria, despite her strong suspicions that she was actually a dreadful spy, did have one real and exceptional talent. She was clairvoyant.

 

Trying to explain clairvoyance to anyone outside of the industry was like trying to explain blue to a blind person. She would be asked, can you see the future? And she would reply, I can sense individual trajectories, non-specifically but occasionally usefully. Patiently, her interlocutors would ask again, yeah, great, but can you see the future? Suria, struggling to explain, would cautiously admit to being sensitive to narrative impetus. For some reason, this sort of linguistic accuracy annoyed people.

 

Or there was telepathy. Upon learning that she was a telepath, people would treat Suria with awe and embarrassment as they mentally rewound and checked their internal monologues for pornography, slander and profanity. Suria would have to kindly tell them that _no one_ can ‘read’ minds, or communicate solely through telepathy. True, it was possible to comprehend bursts of strong feeling from people or to ‘touch’ with her mind a singular intent or desire, and truly great clairvoyants could convey messages through a kind of emotional Morse code. But really telepathy was just another term for an exceptionally sharpened emotional instinct. Invariably, Suria would get a strong reading of contempt mingled with disappointment after this explanation.

 

As a schoolgirl, she had been one of a group of girls who had taken an interest in the paranormal. Suria was quite bright even as a fourteen year old and she could see that most of the hobbies – Ouija boards, third eye training, folk magic, horoscopes – were acts of rebellion, sexuality and boredom looking for release. Most of the other girls lost interest in, e.g., trying to talk to fire spirits after the first time they’d gotten drunk or after their first kiss. Besides, _ki_ required discipline, training and natural talent; visiting Chinese fortune tellers to pick auspicious days to buy a new dress did not.

 

Suria had many happy memories of drifting through the Kuala Lumpur bazaar after school. She and the other girls would talk and joke loudly in English and Mandarin, sometimes reciting whole passages from American sitcoms, which were _so so_ cool. They rolled up their stiff green school skirts and wore cheap scented body sprays that smelt like flowers dumped in chemicals. The gaggle of girls she ‘hung out’ with were mostly ethnic Chinese, although one or two were mixed Chinese and Malay, like Suria. Their parents disapproved of their afterschool loitering, which made it all the more fun.

 

Suria saved these memories for silence and night. Malaysia and her family were so far away that if she gave in to nostalgia in daylight, walking down the road or buying groceries, she’d feel small and weak with the oppressive distance between what she was remembering and what she was doing. Sometimes it was so intense she would feel confused and unbalanced, as if she was trying to play a song on a guitar while singing a completely different one. Every time she consciously compared anything Chinese to anything Malaysian – trees, shoes, people’s expressions, but especially the food – she felt suddenly clumsy in her skin, branded with foreignness. Worse, she’d find herself thinking, these damn Shanghaiese, they’re always rushing-rushing, all the damn girls have a face like they smelled something bad- _la_. But in the dark, with her eyes closed, she could be anywhere.

 

Suria woke up on her depressing sofa. It was so late that it was early in the morning. Weak light was crumbling in through gaps in the blind. Her stomach felt bad. She always got stomach pains whenever she thought of Malaysia; it seemed her body got so homesick it actually wanted to be sick.

 

She could hear noises coming from the other room.

 

She cautiously stretched her feet out on to the floor and tiptoed to the door. In the darkness, everything seemed bigger and loomed dangerously.

 

In the bedroom, the red-head was shouting in his sleep. The language he was using was low in timbre, blurred at the consonants except for the occasional ‘tchok’ and ‘ski’; he seemed to be yelling orders. An eerie yellow light, coming from nowhere, lit him where he lay thrashing against the mattress. The air was filled with the sound of gunfire and the sharp-sweet small of sweat and blood on sand. As Suria approached the bed, she felt the outlines of the scene sweep past her, as if rushing out of the room. The light faded.

 

The red-head was stiller now, although he was panting. Suria watched his chest rise and fall. He said something else; he started to cough painfully and the words continued to unspool into the room, separated from his vocal chords. Suria caught _nyet_ , practically the only word of Russian she knew. She found herself making a list in her head:

 

  1. Speaks Russian.
  2. In fact, shouts Russian. Probably orders. During gunfire.
  3. Perhaps he worked for Russian gangsters.
  4. Although, the first hallucination was marching. Russian army?



 

 

She stared down at him. His skin gleamed as white as the underbelly of a fish. His hair had darkened with sweat. He still wore trousers but he’d managed to take his socks off; his long, strangely elegant toes twisted. His gun belt –

 

 _He wasn’t wearing his gun belt_.

 

Suria looked around frantically in the grimy half-light. Her heart was hammering so hard it felt as if it might climb out of the back of her throat.

 

The gun belt was lying near the bathroom door, abandoned with a casualness that should have made Suria suspicious. It held two guns. Suria pulled out the larger of the two, a heavy grey handgun that seemed to exist in its own shadow. She tested the weight in her hands. It felt good and solid. Guns and cigarettes, she thought, pretending to take aim at a shadow on the wall, so bad for you but so sexy in black and white films…

 

As she sighted along the gun at her imaginary adversary, an agonising shock ran through her arm and she dropped it with thump.

 

Red stars burst in front of Suria’s eyes. She sank her teeth into her lower lip to keep from shrieking. It hurt! Suffering shit-o-tash, it hurt horribly. Underneath the bit of her mind that was howling with pain and hurt pride, she thought, of course he’ll have the gun synced to his morphic field, so no one else can use it. He’s not an idiot. But I am.

 

The other gun in the belt was much smaller, and gold. Suria, now kneeling on the floor and hissing through her teeth, noticed that the golden gun didn’t have a cartridge. Its purpose, she realised, was to shoot pure, bullet-hard bursts of _ki_ at opponents. It was a weapon that required inhuman reserves of control. She twisted her head and stared at the prone figure on the bed with dreadful admiration.

 

He must be very, very good.

 

She decided not to give him a chance to prove it and started to push the guns, with her foot, into the far corner of the room. He’d be able to see them but they were well out of reach, and Suria was counting on his inability to move fast in his current state.

 

The sun was starting to come up now, struggling through the veil of pollution. Something stirred in the air. On the edge of hearing, but also filling the room with its immediacy, Suria heard a muezzin calling the men to prayer.

 

She shuffled towards the bed. A sheet of angry tears drew itself over her eyes. Her stomach twisted. She used to hear the call to prayer all the time in Malaysia; she hadn’t heard it at all since she arrived in China, four years ago. It was unfair, horribly unfair, that the red-heard should have once been momentarily distracted by those haunting tones as well. She couldn’t bear to think of him glancing up from whatever he was doing – shooting a civilian, kicking a puppy, being a bastard – to see the crescent moon and star on the roof of a mosque, to have dismissed it as a background concern, as she once dismissed it. She didn’t want to think they shared any experience; it opened up a sudden chasm of intimacy which made her feel uncomfortable.

 

The sound faded, as if the muezzin had walked slowly away. Silence, true and deep, filled the room. The manifesting hallucinations seemed to have stopped. The red-head stirred and murmured again, unintelligible. Then he gasped, sat bolt upright and was sick over the edge of the bed.

 

It was only a mouthful of puce-coloured liquid but Suria stared at it with massively affronted dignity. She met his bloodshot eyes. “Good morning,” she said coldly.

 

He slumped back, wiped his mouth. “Water,” he croaked. When she didn’t move, he turned his head and gave her an evil grin. “Water,” he said, this time with definite harmonics of danger.

 

Suria sighed and went into the kitchen to fetch a glass and a damp cloth. And so the day begins, she thought gloomily.


	4. Chapter 4

After she’d fed and watered the red-head, and helped him to the door of the bathroom and then back again to the bed – feeling very much like she was appeasing a captive tiger – Suria went out for a walk. She didn’t know where she was going. She just wanted to be as far away from the red-head as possible.

 

Once outside, she walked unsurely, stopping frequently to stare around her. She hadn’t had a day off in months, perhaps even in years. She had always been preparing for an assignment, and before she had been preparing for an assignment she had been training, and before that she had been studying at Beijing University, and that set her back half a decade or more. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed the years streaming past.

 

In her pocket was wallet straining against a solid wedge of _yuan_ and a credit card with her current alias on it. For a shadowing assignment, she was allowed to file ‘reasonable expenses’. Suria regarded the expense account as a gift – the kind of gift the Greeks gave to the Trojans. Nevertheless, she had nothing else to do that day and too much to think about. She might as well take refuge in spending, like all the bored and boring people with cash.

 

She took a taxi to a nearby shopping mall, one of the glass-covered monoliths that sold European brand names. The floor in the main atrium was polished so smooth that it had a watery depth; the lights reflected on its surface looked like captive suns far below a black sea. Everything was reassuringly shiny and compartmentalized. Shopping malls of this size were a relatively new phenomenon in China, but Suria, with a clairvoyant’s grim sureness, could already see record-breaking houses of materialism springing out of the ground like great glittering mushrooms in the not-so-far future.

 

She shook the image off and headed for the French brand names.

 

There were no visible price tags in this shop, because if you had to check a price, you already couldn’t afford the clothing. The hangers were placed half a foot apart on the tastefully minimalist racks, to emphasize the scarcity and luxury of each item. Suria picked out two of the most expensive-looking dresses and stalked towards the changing rooms. The shop assistant, a very pretty girl with her mouth locked in a Shanghai sneer, carefully emptied her face of expression as Suria swept past. Suria could stalk like an aristocratic heron.

 

“ _Ni hao_ ,” the girl murmured as Suria heronned.

 

“ _Ni hao_ ,” she returned frostily, and ducked into a changing room cubicle.

 

She didn’t really want the dresses. She didn’t even really like shopping. But she knew that shopping was what women of leisure liked to do, and she was going to be a woman as leisure for as long as possible, certainly until she became a woman up shit creek.

 

She undressed briskly and started to wriggle into the first dress, a sort of A-shaped silk thing with a stupid collar. As her head popped out, she looked at herself critically in the mirror, wondering for the first time what the red-head saw when he looked at her.

 

Dark glossy hair, skin the colour of peanut butter, almond eyes… she was, she felt, a helpfully non-descript Oriental. She was very tall for an Asian woman but she moved with a quietness and self-containment that made her seem smaller and milder. She was essentially woman-shaped, femininely unspecific. Her ex-boyfriends, her friends and family, had all told her that she was pretty, but she felt that she could put on prettiness like she could put on a necklace – temporarily, for fun, until it became necessary to take it off again. She wondered whether the red-head really saw her at all, or whether she was just a moving target to him.

 

She smoothed the front of the dress down. It was trendily loose and square. It looked ridiculous.

 

Oh well, she thought cheerfully, and shook out the next one.

 

Suria passed a mindless afternoon wandering in and out of shops, frosting people and trying on clothes. She could feel her low-grade panic returning as a sort of hum underneath her consciousness, but she ignored it. She ate an overpriced lunch at a booth restaurant, then went out to window-shop for things like coffee machines and gold-plated pens until she felt dumb with boredom and decided to make her way back to the safe house.

 

On the way back, the taxi drove past a covered street market, which blew in the smells of cheap shopping – dangerously ripe fruit, fishy wafts, the acrid stink of cheap plastic shoes sweating in the sun, the tingling smell of budget electrics struggling against the humidity. The smells made Suria feel oddly disassociated from herself, as if her nose were sensing things that her mind refused to acknowledge. Shanghai spun away from her suddenly, receding into dimness. Everything felt like a test, everything was a club she wasn’t welcome in. The moment passed, but it left her feeling lightheaded.

 

She made her way through the secret entrance at the ‘hotel’ automatically, trying not to think about what lay at her destination.

 

As she crept into the kitchen, she listened out for any noises or smells that suggested manifesting hallucinations. Very faintly, she thought she could hear a single violin, but this too faded as she edged closer to the bedroom door. When she turned the door handle, she heard laughter and male voices shouting happily, but as if through cloth. Then, cutting through all these sounds, a man screaming.

 

Suria slammed open the door and ran up to the bed. The red-head was locked in a weird contorted pose but he wasn’t making the noise. Suria saw, out of the corner of her eye, a spray of blood arcing upwards, but when she turned, there was nothing there. She looked down at the twisted figure on the bed.

 

His skin was covered in a translucent pale purple sheen that smelt (she suddenly realised) foul. She knew that if she touched it, it would feel gelatinous and grossly warm. It was thicker around his temples and under his armpits, clustering there in wet pustules, disappearing into his hairline. Suria forced herself to remember the process of the Blossoming. The purple stinking substance was a sort ineffectual defence mechanism, like a blister. The red-head’s body was trying to eject some biomythic toxin but was damaging itself in the process. The wet purple stuff had soaked the bandages. Suria knew she’d have to clean him and redress his wounds, but she lingered over his body, unwilling to start.

 

Something moved behind her. She knew better than to look round.

 

On the wall opposite, a shadow wavered then straightened, becoming a crouching human figure, then a standing human figure, then a human figure unfurling enormous wings…

 

The red-head groaned and hissed something in Japanese. The shadow vanished as he opened his eyes and met hers.

 

“Miss Li,” he mumbled, and groped for the glass of water she had left beside him before going out.

 

“Wait,” she said. She helped him sit up, suppressing a shudder as she touched his skin, and lifted the water to his mouth. He was noticeably weaker; he kept stopping to take breaths between mouthfuls. The purple stuff seemed to weigh him down, although in some places it was nothing more than an unhealthy patina. As she pulled her supporting hand back, some of it came away in a stinking goo. It took all of her self-control not to frantically shake it off.

 

“I’ll get, um, I’ll just go and,” she said, and all but ran out of the room.

 

She ran her hand under the hot water tap; it burned but the pain felt purifying. The purple stuff congealed and fell off in discoloured lumps. She had to poke it down the sinkhole. She boiled some water, found some thin towels under the sink in the sad bathroom, and went back into the bedroom with bandages and steely resolve.

 

The red-head was slumped back on the bed. He rolled his eyes in her direction when she came in but didn’t seem able to move his body. “Ah,” he murmured, “room service.”

 

Suria set her things down on the bedside table and stared at him. “I’m glad to see you’re taking this seriously,” she said coldly. “I’m glad I’m not the only thing in the world standing between you and a death lying in your own filth and effluvia.”

 

“Death is death,” he purred, faintly but complacently. “Dying soiled or dying powdered and perfumed makes very little difference to the feelings of a corpse.”

 

“How Zen,” Suria said sourly. “Does this particular corpse-in-waiting have a preference?”

 

The red-head appeared to think for a second, then gave her a vaudevillian leer. “You’ll have to take my trousers off.”

 

Suria sighed theatrically and reached for the scissors she’d used to cut the red-head’s shirt off yesterday. In fact, this was exactly what she had been dreading as soon as she saw the purple slime.

 

She pulled off his socks (black) first. They were some kind of stylish lightweight silk-and-cotton mix, and even in her private hell of fear and fury a small part of her wondered if she could steal them later on. He had narrow, bony white feet with

long toes; purple scabs gathered between each one, smelling abominable.

 

She started to cut the left-hand trouser leg first. The trousers (black) looked expensive too. All of his clothes looked expensive. One white shin appeared, covered with wiry golden hair. Suria kept her face down, scrutinizing the emergent leg with excessive interest. She noticed that there were little glistening circlets of pale purple, almost lilac, around each hair follicle, oozing up from under the skin. His knees – knobbly, oddly gnarled – appeared next, then the lower halves of his thighs, which were lean and muscular, like an anatomical model. Suria cut with care. When she reached high enough on the thigh, a strip of black cotton appeared under the trousers and she pulled back, walked around to the other side of the bed and started on the next leg.

 

The red-head snorted mockingly.

 

She ignored him and continued her steady process up the next leg. Ankles, shin, knee, thigh. As the material divided under the blades, it fell away to reveal a puckered white scar that started on red-head’s inner thigh, a few inches above the knee, and climbed towards his hipbone. Suria studied it. She’d been vaguely aware of other, possibly more dramatic old scars on the red-head’s chest and back, but they hadn’t been as fascinating as this one as they were not, e.g., very very close to the cradle of his pubic bones.

 

She hesitated. The red-head made a sort of snarl-chuckle noise, like a parody of a cartoon pervert.

 

Oh, get bent, thought Suria. You think you can just sneer and get me scared of you because you’ve got a dick? Remember which one of us is holding the blades, _guilao_.

 

“Remember which one of us is holding the blades, _guilao_ ,” she said out loud.

 

“And doing such admirable work, Miss Li,” said the red-head cheerfully. “Do you usually linger this long when you undress men? Or perhaps you’ve never had the opportunity?”

 

Suria clenched her jaw and, with three snips, cut all the way to the waistband.             

 

“You must be absolutely quivering with pleasure at your good luck,” continued the red-head, sing-song nasty. She gritted her teeth and cut through the waistband at the other leg, then grabbed one edge and pulled the material away from under him as quickly as she could.

 

The smell was awful now. It had an undertone of rotting meat and a sharp note that abraded the nostrils and even the throat. Suria was fairly sure that the purple excretions were thickest in the hottest parts of his body: the armpits, the head and the crotch. Which meant she was about to unleash the worst of it into the room.

 

She steeled herself, even as the bile rose in her throat, and started to cut through the red-head’s underwear.

 

She had to put one hand on his hip to steady the material as she cut and the putrid seepage felt as if it was infecting her palm. She swallowed repeatedly to keep from gagging.

 

When she finally pulled the remains of the black cotton away from under the red-head (he just about managing to lift his hips), she couldn’t help but choke a little, and even the red-head clicked his tongue in disgust.

 

“I’ll burn these,” she muttered, as the red-head said,

 

“It’s not quite dinner by candlelight on the Bund, but this is such a thoughtful first date.”

 

Suria froze for a moment, then dropped the sweat-and-purple-pus dampened underwear and burst out laughing.

 

The red-head gave her a lopsided smirk. “Help me slip into something a little more comfortable, would you?” he said, and Suria started to laugh so hard that her sides twinged in protest.

 

“It’s not _that_ funny,” said the red-head, suddenly unsmiling and dry.

 

Suria, gasping for breath, straightened up and wiped the tears from her eyes. “It’s the way you look,” she managed, still grinning. “You’re just lying there like a dead body. You look exactly like something on an autopsy table and you smell _hideous_ and yet you’re making sex gags.”

 

The red-head smiled his more standard dismissive sneer. “At least in this position I’ll be less trouble to you when I eventually expire. Now. Do something about this.”

 

They were the same words he’d used after he’d shot Wei and they brought Suria back to reality with a jolt. She walked back to the side of the bed where the bowl stood and wetted a towel in the still-hot water.

 

She’d managed to avoid looking at the red-head’s genitals even whilst cutting through his underwear, but kneeling by his body, she was in no position to ignore them. As she’d suspected, the wet pustules of purple were thickest at his crotch, bubbling up and lying like a sickening jelly over the hairs. Approximately in the centre, and slightly encrusted, lay his penis. (There, Suria thought, I’ve acknowledged it, that is his penis.) From the angle Suria was at, cleaning the red-head’s chest and arms, it looked like a grotesque mushroom growing out of purple mud.

 

The purple slime came off easily enough; it thickened like cornflour when touched by water. The skin underneath was grimy and pallid but within the bounds of normalcy. Suria settled into a rhythm, scraping the purple off first and then scrubbing the de-purpled area with a hot towel. “I’ll need to change the bandages too,” she told the red-head, feeling herself adopting brusque, workmanlike bedside manner.

 

The red-head grunted and let Suria help him sit up. “Your stitches are holding,” he admitted grudgingly, then abruptly flopped into unconsciousness as she was cutting through the dressing at his shoulder.

 

She worked for another five or ten minutes, grateful for the silence. Under her hands she could still feel the roiling temperature changes caused by the Blossoming, but whatever biomythic toxin had caused the red-head to erupt in purple pus appeared to by lying dormant.

 

As she was tying the bandages off, she heard the rhythmic clockwork swoop of helicopter flight somewhere off to the right of the bed. It had a tinny quality, as if coming from cheap speakers. When she looked towards the corner that the sound had come from, she had an impression of movement there, no more tangible than a vague chiaroscuro of shifting light and shadows that seemed to depict men in uniforms, falling stones, faraway explosions. The red-head groaned softly then stiffened in her arms. He muttered something in what was probably Russian and the vision in the corner solidified into pandemonium.

 

Suria was a talented clairvoyant but the hallucination was the product of a degenerative disease and therefore confused and delirious. At first, the only definite fragments were the smell of oil and gunpowder, the roar of heavy artillery and a vista of stones, but scene refocused and she found herself in the midst of vicious fighting. Gunfire whistled over her head. Men, solid-looking, stinking of sweat, gesticulated and shouted orders in languages she didn’t understand while passing clean through the bed. The occasional boom of a tank’s cannon made her teeth rattle but didn’t even cause ripples in the bowl of water. The atmosphere was raw with _ki_ bombardment. Blood spattered, morphic fields tangled and reset. Fireballs crackled and flamed, scorching the air. She felt the stones beneath her feet shifting and writhing as magical discharge sank into the earth. The fighting was polluted and savage.

 

Then the scene pulled back again and she was high above the fighting in a sudden deafening silence. She was looking down into a green and brown valley, set against a broad indifferent sky, magnificent in its vastness…

 

The red-head shouted something and flailed. The scene vanished and Suria was back in a whore’s old quarters with a dying, incoherent man on the bed in front of her.

 

The hallucination’s startling evaporation was a shock. For a couple of seconds Suria’s vision tunnelled and her face started to go numb, but she brought herself back under control through sheer willpower and a bit of rapid blinking. She lowered the red-head onto the pillows. His chest was rising and falling rapidly and he couldn’t focus. “I’m going to start on the bottom half now,” she said loudly. “Just to warn you. Don’t try anything funny, including telling jokes.”

 

The sound of her voice appeared to calm him, or at least it made him stop panting so frantically. She shuffled down to the end of the bed and started to wash his feet and ankles. She wanted to put off touching the more fleshly areas for as long as possible. He came round and fixed her with an incurious gaze.

 

As she was working her way up his shins, the red-head said, “You’re bleeding.”

 

She paused. When he didn’t say anything else, she prompted him. “More information please.”

 

“Your nose is bleeding,” replied the red-head reluctantly. “Not much. Wipe it with the towel.”

 

She did. It must have been the pressure of descrying then unexpectedly unscrying that had caused her to bleed. Manifesting hallucinations weren’t usually so _intense_.

 

She scraped the slime from the lower half of his thighs next. The blood she’d wiped from her nose left a little smear above his right knee, but frankly that was the least of his problems. It was the least of hers too; sooner or later she was going to have to touch his genitals, and (even more awful!) his arse.

 

Dread makes people tactless. The next thing Suria said was, “Are you Russian?” and it was greeted with an ominous silence.

 

She threw one filthy towel aside, reached for a new one. “You’ve been speaking Russian, or at least what I think is Russian,” she explained, and began work, with exaggerated diligence, on his mid-thighs.

 

“It may have been Russian,” the red-head conceded.

 

“So you’re Russian?”

 

“I didn’t say that.”

 

“But you were in the Russian army?”

 

This was greeted with a far more profound and thoughtful silence. Suria glanced up to see the red-head regarding her steadily, apparently checking to see if she was going to produce a chain of coloured handkerchiefs from her mouth.

 

“Why do you think I was in the Russian army?” asked the red-head, slowly, like a man trying to figure out where the bombs in the next sentence are hidden.

 

“Because you keep hallucinating a war in a valley somewhere and shouting in Russian,” said Suria smartly. She was at the tops of his thighs now, grazing the hollow at the hip joint.

 

The purple pustules were so thick here that Suria was forced to abandon her towels and begin by pulling the stuff off by hand first. In the process she found herself tugging gently on pubic hairs, which unfurled and then sprung back into curls. The red-head didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at Suria with a carefully blank expression. It was, she knew, her first victory.

 

After a space of about fifty seconds, or a few hundred years by Suria’s standards, the red-head said, “Yes, I was in the Soviet army. A long time ago. But I’m not Russian.”

 

Suria nodded. She was pretty sure she’d got the area down to a state of sufficient unpurple that she could start back on the towels. “And the valley?”

 

The red-head hesitated, but he also seemed to sense that she had won an undeclared battle. “Panjshir Valley,” he said. “Afghanistan. Almost a decade ago now.”

 

Suria hadn’t given much thought to the red-head’s age, but she realised this would be quite useful to work with and stored it away for future reference. “So where are you from originally?”

 

The red-head laughed at that. The tension dissipated, and with it Suria’s advantage. She frowned at the damp towel, unwilling to apply it.

 

“Is this actually your first time?” asked the red-head, with a note of superior amusement.

 

Suria met his eyes. “Do you mean, is this my first time wiping purple pus from the body of an idiot undergoing a Blossoming? Because the answer to that is yes. If you’re asking whether this is the first time I’ve looked, with disappointment, on the body of a naked man, then the answer is no.”

 

The red-head cackled then broke off for a coughing fit. Once he’d brought himself back under control, he said, “Well, then, you ought to know that it’s not going to do much harm in its current state. Stop being such a village girl and get on with it.”

 

Suria screwed her face up and got on with it.

 

The red-head settled back and looked at the ceiling. “So,” he said, in a casual voice that wasn’t fooling anyone, “you’re clairvoyant.”

 

“Yes.” Suria was struggling with the red-head’s recalcitrant foreskin. She’d never actually had to deal with a penis that wasn’t erect. It was like wrestling with a half-deflated balloon animal filled with custard. She felt positive that she would never be aroused ever again.

 

The red-head mulled this over. “Are you any good?”

 

“Yes. Raise your knees.”

 

He did as he was told. “You can see manifesting hallucinations…”

 

“I’m very, very good,” Suria broke in impatiently. “And I’m a ‘talented girl’ for martial arts as well. And I’m a good cook, and I can do handstands, and I’ve got all my own teeth.”

 

The red-head gave her a slow, callous smile. “That would certainly explain why they sent you after me,” he said, “because you are an appalling spy.”

 

Suria grimly applied a hot towel to a tender area. The red-head pursed his lips and stopped talking.

 

Suria finished her task in silence and slapped the towels into the water. They would all need boiling. The bed sheets were ruined and needed changing, but Suria felt too drained to even contemplate the logistics of moving the red-head. At least she wouldn’t need to clothe him again; the heat of the day filled the room like insulating foam.

 

“I’m going to cook something,” Suria told him, picking up the bowl. “You can have as much as you can keep down.”

 

She paused at the door, waiting for a sign of acknowledgment, but the red-head stayed silent. His face was turned away from her, towards the corner where she’d first seen the valley hallucination. Perhaps he had relapsed into unconsciousness again. She shrugged to herself and started to leave.

 

“Valerian,” said the red-head, quietly.

 

Suria turned back. “What?”

 

“My name is Valerian.”

 

Suria stared at him. His long white body looked alien and artistocratic. She could just see the lashes of one eye, trembling slightly, and the tautness of the tendons in his neck.

 

She opened her mouth, closed it, and then chuckled unsurely. “You’ve had all day and ‘Valerian’ is the best you could come up with?”

 

He finally turned to face her. His expression was unreadable but his mouth seemed, if not actually gentler, then at least unsneering. “It’s my operational name, and indeed the only one I answer to any more… Miss Li,” he replied, then shut his eyes and turned his head away.


	5. Chapter 5

He was fully conscious for dinner but suffered a bad relapse afterwards. His fevered speech switched from Russian to Japanese. Suria sat through a hallucination that took place under a canopy of blossoming cherry trees, involving the ritual decapitation of a man in a Western-style business suit surrounded by other men in black formal kimonos. When it passed, the red-head was conscious enough to be helped to the bathroom. He tried to speak to her but the speech came out garbled, more like a broken machine than a human stammer.

 

Suria took the opportunity to strip and remake the bed.

 

She went back into the bathroom to fetch him when the next hallucination started: boys’ laughter and taunting in another language she didn’t recognise. He was lying on the floor under the showerheads. A faint smile flickered across his face when the high-pitched laughter turned to shrieks of horror. She dug her hands under his armpits and dragged him back out into the bedroom.

 

The hallucinations continued all through the night. Sometimes the scents and the sounds would make it through to Suria’s room, but the action was always confined to the bedroom. Late into the night, she would force herself out of bed if she heard the red-head or any other voice speaking Japanese, hoping to gather some intelligence for what remained of her mission, but what she found was rarely useful. He hallucinated, in beautifully rendered detail, a meal of live baby octopus, a cramped room filled with surveillance equipment, an empty public bathhouse with dimmed lights and cracked walls. He completely failed to hallucinate a police line-up or a list of names.

 

The red-head’s Japanese was faultless. She added this to her meagre stockpile of information.

 

By dawn she was exhausted and enervated. She fell asleep to the sound of conversation in that unrecognisable language; then later, a single violin again, playing something so mournful that she dreamt herself crying.

 

She slept late, waking up when the silence surprised her out of a shallow doze. She brewed tea in the kitchen. The skylight showed a sun already high in the sky. There wasn’t a hint of noise from the read-head’s bedroom. Suria poured herself a cup, listening anxiously. Not only was there not a hint of noise, there was a disturbing blankness emanating from the room.

 

Oh fuck, thought Suria, he’s dead.

 

Then she thought, well, if he’s dead, he’s not going anywhere, so I might as well finish this tea.

 

It was jasmine leaf tea, rather more expensive than most of the other groceries in the kitchen. Suria absentmindedly chewed on one of the leaf shreds.

 

She swilled the dregs in the cup back and forth and let her eyes go out of focus. The kitchen was still and quiet; not even the noise of the street disturbed the calm. Suria had the impression that she was in a bubble, a pocket of time, as if the world beyond the door had temporarily ceased to exist and the edges of the instant she existed in, torn from the flow of present into future, was creeping along, looking for the right moment to reattach itself…

 

She kept her eyes unfocused. The room was tugging gently at her. She was in a train, on a journey; she was at a crossroads, she was picking the path lined with red-gold leaves…

 

The rasping sound of a throat being cleared dragged her back. The noise welled up and flooded in.

 

“Miss Li,” came a hoarse voice from the bedroom.

 

Suria blinked and stood up carefully. Her mouth tasted as if she’d been sucking on a dirty ice cube, the way it did after divinations. The blankness she’d felt from the bedroom had filled out, as if the red-head had died and gone back to living, out of spite.

 

“Damn you,” she called back evenly, “what is it?”

 

She ambled into the bedroom. The red-head lay diagonally across the bed, an obscene mannequin. The pallor of his skin looked unreal and waxen.

 

“Disorder, disorder,” he mumbled in Mandarin, then added something in the unrecognisable language he’d started to speak. Suria put her hands on either side of his face, her thumbs in the sockets of his closed eyes, and shook him.

 

He bared his teeth, snarled wordlessly then grabbed both of her wrists. Anger or pain had brought him round.

 

“My guns.”

 

“In the corner, out of reach, because I’m not a fool. Do you want to shoot yourself and end it all?”

 

He pushed her balled fists away so that they landed with a bump against her shoulders, then gathered her forearms and upper arms together in the span of his long white hands. “Tempting,” he hissed. “The pain is… chaotic.”

 

“There’s always the morphine.”

 

“Don’t give me the morphine, you slack-jawed cud-chewing peasant girl!” he yelled, his voice cracking. “If you medicate it, you feed it!”

 

Suria allowed him to hold her there. He was getting weaker by the hour; she could have broken his clutch with one easy twist. The long lines of his throat stretched and slackened as he writhed. Rusty stains appeared on the bandages, like a Polaroid developing.

 

“You need some proper adhesive waterproof dressings,” said Suria mildly, “to hold your guts in.”

 

He snarled at her, let her go, thrashed against the bed sheets with a terrible groan.

 

Suria got up slowly. “I’ll get you some water,” she said in the same placid tone, “and then I’ll go out.”

 

She’d never seen a body pushed to the extremities of experience before. It was curiously fascinating. It felt like the most private moment she’d ever witnessed.

 

She went out, stayed away for two hours in a state of suspended mindlessness. The day had a high, fine inconsequentiality to it. When she returned she ate lunch and washed in the mean little bathroom, watching the water stream over her knees without registering its touch.

 

The purple effluvia had started seeping out of the red-head’s pores again. It was evidently some bitter bodily defence against the manifesting hallucinations. In her empty calm, she washed his body clean, thinking in monotones.

 

“Do you think I’ll live, Miss Li?” he asked her, in an increasingly rare lucid moment.

 

“ _Bu mingxian_ ,” she replied. Unclear.

 

“You’re doing something to me,” he said, “but I don’t know what.”

 

Before she could shake off her pleasant apathy and ask him what he meant, he’d fallen silent and another war hallucination shredded the room. Suria watched it with stately calm. She felt contained and warm, like an egg being sat on by a chicken.

 

That evening she made dinner with the unthinking correctness of an automaton. In the next room, the red-head was awash with visions, his temporal field palpitating agitatedly as memories from three weeks ago fought for precedence with childhood recollections. Buds of nostalgia burst and frothed between hallucinations, bleeding along the edges of the sharper, purer memories. The jigsaw of his selfhood was scattered wantonly about the room. Suria, coasting in from time to time to force water between his mumbling lips, could walk through a murder-evisceration in a car-park and a day making snowmen in a big public park in the time it took to cross from the door to the bed. When she brought him a small bowl a food, she crossed what she now knew to be the rocky ledges of the Panjshir Valley to reach the abandoned mountain caves of Ngari in Tibet. She kicked rusting armour and fragments of bones out of the way to reach the red-head. When she dribbled the first spoon of white rice gruel between his lips, he gave a strange high moan and pulled at the cloth of her shirt. The room wavered and gulped. It was a child’s room in an attic in a cold country; it was a little cloth-roofed boat on the great lake at Beijing’s Summer Palace.

 

“Eat,” she said mildly, but the sound of rain on the water made her pause. At the very base of her mind, she could feel something stirring. She blinked and ignored it with cheerful suddenness.

 

It took her nearly an hour to get a small bowl on congee down the red-head’s gullet. He was dying faster now. He seemed to be nothing more than a twist of flesh in a prison of sounds.

 

Suria propelled herself back into the kitchen. She had a faint but insistent sensation that someone many rooms away was also, bizarrely, simultaneously, yelling at the back of her head.

 

She shrugged to herself and started to wash up.

 

When she reached the teacup from her morning’s drink, she glanced at the pattern on tea leaves through force of habit. What she saw made her momentarily lose her sight through shock. The tea leaves had settled into a perfect _yin yang_.

 

Suria counted four heartbeats, her eyes fixed on the flawless little picture. An artist with a compass and a fine brush could not have painted a more symmetrical symbol.

 

Her thoughts bubbled up in her head, apparently insisting that they all be thought at the same time.

 

What does it mean?

 

It’s too perfect, it must be the meddling of something Higher.

 

I am too tired for this to be real.

 

How tacky.

 

I feel fine.

 

I’m not Taoist.

 

I know what this means.

 

What a clichéd divination!

 

I know what this means for me.

 

I know what this means for him and for me.

 

And then, just as quickly, she unthought all of her thoughts and went back to washing up, tipping the tea leaves into the bin. And she absolutely did not notice that she had, in her absentmindedness, snapped a chopstick in half.

 

 


End file.
